The present invention relates to intraoperative guidance for cardiac procedures using medical images, and more particularly, to intraoperative guidance in off-pump mitral valve repair using physiological image fusion.
Percutaneous cardiac interventions are accounting for an increasing amount of all cardiac procedures. Non-invasive image analysis is crucial for off-pump, minimal invasive procedures. Various technologies are rapidly emerging for percutaneous mitral valve repair, such as Edge-to-Edge techniques, Annuloplasty, Chordae Replacement, etc.
Fusion and advanced visualization of medical images, which are complementary to current standards in interventional imaging provide the overall perception and feedback to the surgeons. The traditional way of registering image modalities via image-based methods however has limited capabilities, due to the context-free nature of these methods. This leads in most of the cases to alignment results not tolerable in practice. In particular, interventional procedures are largely guided by 2D+time fluoroscopy sequences, providing low contrast images, which may be difficult to interpret. The limited input and image artifacts induced by the employed devices make the catheter navigation rather challenging and increase the potential risks of cardiac intervention procedures.